Digital rights management (DRM) is generally used to protect digital content from unauthorized access. Generally, the DRM either grants or denies access to an entirety of digital content. If a user is granted access to a document, for example, then the user has the same access rights, such as open or print, throughout the entire document.
In some instances, however, a document may be created with confidential content that is intended for sole use by authorized users, while also including common content that is intended for any users. Generally, to protect the confidential content from unauthorized users, multiple copies of the document are created, DRM is applied to each document, and then different copies of the document are distributed to different sets of users. However, management of each of the copies of the document can be challenging, such as to track which user gets which copy. Further, if a user needs to refer to different sections of the document, then that user may need to have multiple copies of the document available. Further still, if access rights change, then a new copy of the document with modified DRM is distributed to those same users who received the original copy. This can lead to redundancy, increased storage use, and user confusion and frustration regarding which document to use.